Looking East Over My Shoulder

“Looking East Over My Shoulder is marked by quiet joy — joy in life and in language. It’s a lovely debut.” Starred review—Quill and Quire

Synopsis: Looking East Over My Shoulder is a book that wakes with the dawn and goes on to explore how the day unfolds, in poems populated by animals, plants, and people both real and imagined. Drawing on the natural world around her and on an inner arena of love and family – both worlds infused with their inevitable darks and lights – Jill Jorgenson finds voice for the tender and the bitter, the peace and the turmoil, the playful and the wise. Her attention alights on often unlikely subjects: a pinwheel, a basket of overripe lychees, the hollow shaft of a spent lily, a jerryrigged shopping buggy, a dead hornet, the sounds that different kinds of sprinklers make, the moon’s reflection in her mug of coffee. Of such seemingly unpromising material, she is able to make something that elicits a surprised smile of recognition. Riffs of exuberant wordplay and soundplay alternate with quieter music in meditations that touch on spiritual and philosophical questions. Humane, intelligent, unjaded, this first collection hums throughout with liveliness of observation and love of the language.